Decline and Plummet
McGillicuddy Serious attracted a surprising level of support, and became one of the larger parties outside parliament. On a number of occasions, particularly following the introduction of the mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system, pundits predicted that McGillicuddy Serious might actually win parliamentary representation, but this never happened. When the major parties boycotted the Tauranga by-election 1993 in 1993, the McGillicuddy Serious candidate Greg Pittams, (who appeared in nationwide newspapers during this campaign wearing his "emperors new kilt" outfit, consisting of only a shirt and sporran), finished second to Winston Peters... a very, very distant second. Votes for McGillicuddy presumably most often represented protest votes, something that the party encouraged with one of its slogans: "If you want to waste your vote, vote for us."
As time went on, McGillicuddy Serious began to encounter the problem that often appears in joke parties — a debate about exactly how serious it should become. The original founders of the party essentially saw it as "a bit of fun", aimed at providing humour and entertainment. This remained a major part of McGillicuddy Serious throughout its history. However, later recruits to the party sometimes saw the party's satire in a more serious context, regarding it as a tool with which people could ridicule and challenge the political establishment. In particular a number of anarchists joined the party, seeing it as an antidote to the traditional order and intending to use the party as a vehicle to give anarchist policies a higher public profile. The dichotomy, in essence, grew between "satire for fun" and "satire to make a political point". Many of the party's original members resented what they saw as a usurpation of the party for more avowedly political and overdefined anarchist purposes, and felt that for the party to become openly "anarchist" would thus make some area of politics "off-limits" to satire. They saw this as an anathema. In addition they saw having a clearly identifiable stance as lessening the party's effectiveness as satirists. However other members had little problem with the expression of more openly anarchist viewpoints.
Read more about this topic: McGillicuddy Serious Party
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